Recreational vehicles, such as mountainboards, motorized carts and pedal-operated carts are operated over a variety of terrains. These terrains can include many different types of surfaces, including hard, soft, smooth and irregular (i.e., rough or bumpy) surfaces. It is difficult to design wheel and tire assemblies that provide optimum performance characteristics on a variety of surfaces. Therefore, the wheels and tires that are provided on recreational vehicles are often designed for optimum performance on a particular type of surface only, or are designed to provide compromised performance on a variety of surfaces.
Traditional wheel and tire assemblies for recreational vehicles include a wheel and a tubed or tubeless pneumatic tire mounted on the wheel. To ensure adequate load bearing capacity, to retain the tires on their rims and to ensure that the tires resist the torque applied to rotate and stop rotation of the wheels and tires, the tires are typically constructed of tough, relatively hard materials and are inflated to high operating pressures, typically in excess of 10 psi. When the typical wheel and tire assemblies are mounted on a vehicle and subjected to an axial load by a rider/operator, the tires flatten only very slightly and generally retain the appearance of deflated, unloaded tires. As a result, the contact areas between the tires and the support surfaces underlying the tires are small, so that the pressure per unit area on the support surfaces is high, which causes the wheels and tires to sink partially into soft support surfaces such as sand and loose dirt. The high operating pressures to which the tires are inflated also make the tires less yielding to obstacles, bumps and irregularities on the support surface, which can lead to a bumpy ride, and thus a loss of speed while traversing terrain and diminished control of the vehicle by a rider/operator.
The invention aims to provide an improved wheel and tire assembly for recreational vehicles to allow for optimum performance on a wide variety of surfaces. Additionally, it is an object of the invention to provide a wheel and tire assembly wherein the tire is securely mounted to the wheel without being permanently attached to the wheel, in order to ensure safe operation and ease of replacement for the tire and/or wheel. The invention further aims to provide a wheel and tire assembly that can be manufactured relatively quickly and inexpensively.